2013-01-06

I was trying to add a comment to a recent post on Bruce Humes' blog, but apparently you can't enter HTML there. So here it is.

You may be interested in the statistics in UNESCO's Index Translationum, which is based primarily on the data (not always complete) from the participating nations' national libraries (such as the Library of Congress). The "Index" is aware of 81 books translated from Uighur into other languages published since 1979. Most of them (56) were published in the USSR (i.e., during 1979-1991; the Soviets were big at this kind of thing; most of these translations were into Russian, but also into Kazakh, German etc); and 19 more titles, in China. (Interestingly, not all of the latter were translations into Chinese!). And the remaining 6 titles, all over the world - including Europe, the USA, and even Singapore.

Not surprisingly, translations from Chinese to Uighur are a lot more numerous: 2006 titles over the same time frame. (You don't even need to go to Xinjiang to see a collection of these kind of works: there is, for example, a very quiet and dusty room in the National Library in Beijing full of such editions, some still in Romanized Uighur and Kazakh!).

The index is also aware of 8 books translated from Manchu published worldwide in the same time frame, and 946 translations from Kazakh (870 of which published in the USSR, 15 in China, and 10 in Russia. (Strangely, they don't seem to have any data on translations from Kazakh published in the independent Kazakhstan itself).